


Fire and Sandstone

by aster_risk



Category: Ocean's (Movies), Ocean's 8, Ocean's Eight
Genre: Aesthetic Porn, F/F, Minor Bar Fights, Pretty Desert Scenery, Resolved Sexual Tension
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-21
Updated: 2018-06-21
Packaged: 2019-05-26 08:31:58
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,717
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14996915
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aster_risk/pseuds/aster_risk
Summary: It takes a bar fight, two thousand miles, and a red horizon for Debbie Ocean to admit she's in love with her partner.





	Fire and Sandstone

“Jesus, Lou, you’ve been back for two days, and you’re already nursing battle scars.” Debbie dragged a cottonball down the gash on her partner’s palm.

 

If she felt the burn of hydrogen peroxide, Lou didn’t show it on her face. “Two days longer than last time,” she smirked. She leaned lazily against the back of a chair, straddling the seat in blue boots to make David Bowie proud.

 

“You know for a criminal, you have an impressive savior complex,” Debbie said, looking up to Lou’s expectant eyes. Strands of untended hair fell out of her ponytail and into her frame of vision.

 

“Little shit wouldn’t keep his hands off her,” Lou sighed, too quietly to be a huff of faux-exasperation.

 

“Ah.” That explained it. There had always been something weathered and just in Lou, the closest the world had seen to a proper outlaw, alone on a horse, in the 1960s film set of Monument Valley. Swashbuckling, swindling, riding on red rock and stealing hearts in spite of it. Her Cheshire grins hid her quiet exhaustion with the world.

 

“No one was looking; club music pounds out people’s senses. The two of them were blind drunk, flirting outside the club. And he just—” Lou swept her uninjured hand across Debbie’s vision— “shoved her into a corner and prodded her like grocery store chicken. She tried to tell him off, and he wouldn’t listen. And then he was ripping her buttons, and I just saw red.”

 

“Let me guess: you pulled him off her; he drunkenly squared up for a fight, and you didn’t realize he had a knife until it was already in your fucking hand.” Debbie arched an eyebrow, but she didn’t have the heart to scold her recklessness. Not after five years in prison and a hundred and fifty million dollar theft, and not given the situation.

 

Lou shook her head. “Not a knife. Expensive bottle opener.”

 

Debbie pursed her lips. “I would tell you not to pick fights with wasted trust fund babies, but I wouldn’t mean it.”

 

“I won,” Lou mumbled in a voice like sandpaper. 

 

Debbie screwed the bottle of antiseptic shut and set it on their overcrowded table. “There,” she declared, Lou’s open palm resting in her lap.

 

“I’m a fortune teller’s worst nightmare,” Lou snorted, examining the wound.

 

“You always were.” Debbie ran her thumb along Lou’s broken lifeline, roughened from where she had wiped away dried blood. She froze in Lou’s steel-blue eyes, the sharp cast of her frame in the lamplight. Five years had hardened them, but Lou wore time like she wore leather—molding to it, letting it carve her figure like sandstone into something androgynous and intense.  _ Intense.  _ It was the only word that seemed to capture Lou effectively, except perhaps  _ sultry _ , when she stretched out and didn’t protest when Debbie stared. Privately, Debbie feared that if she stopped staring, Lou would flicker and vanish the way she always did when this spell was broken.

 

“Don’t get into trouble where I can’t save you, okay?” she scolded softly, letting the corner of her mouth curve into a wan smile. 

 

Lou smiled back, cocksure and brilliant. “Speak for yourself, Jailbird.”

 

“I mean it. I know you’re leaving again, in a few days. Take care of yourself on the road.”

 

“I came back in one piece, didn’t I? I survived California.” 

 

“Yeah, you did” Debbie admitted quietly. Lou had turned up at the door the final day of her parole, tanned, dusty, bursting with wildness. Debbie nearly swooned at the sight of her, though she’d never confess it. She reached for the bandage lying tangled on the worn table. “Here,” she whispered, holding Lou’s outstretched hand in her own and wrapping it too slowly, too carefully. She could hear an intake of breath and knew a question was coming.

 

“Want to come with me?” 

 

Whatever she’d expected Lou to ask, it wasn’t  _ that.  _ Lou was a solitary creature, and had always gone unsaid that her adventures were hers alone. “Where to?” She pinned the bandage in place, trying to sound nonchalant.

 

Lou smirked again and stood up. She held herself loosely, all limbs on a wire frame. “Wherever you want, honey.” She offered her hand. “Deborah Ocean, come away with me.”  
And Debbie knew she meant it because Lou said her name. 

 

                                                                                                                                 *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *

 

The desert bathed Lou in gold and history. Her cheeks turned the color of Arizona sandstone; she spoke with a laughing fervor she’d lacked in her youth. Debbie was content to watch her, like she’d always watched, from the glittering sidecar, as Lou chased a red horizon into the night. 

 

“Nice room,” Debbie commented, dropping her duffel on the stained carpet. Sure, they had a cool seventy million dollars between them, but classy hotels were a dreamy mirage here in the middle of nowhere. They crashed where they could find a place.

 

“It’s not the Ritz,” admitted Lou with a lopsided frown. “But it’ll do.” She threw open a set of paisley curtains and slipped through a screen door to the balcony. (Balcony was a strong word:  the outdoor space was maybe two feet deep and four feet wide, contained by a rusting iron rail.)

 

She stepped outside as Lou leaned against the railing, lighting a cigarette.

 

“That’ll kill you one day,” she muttered half-heartedly.

 

“This?” Lou held up the flimsy thing, then pointedly took a drag. “If I want to live long enough to be killed by a cigarette, I’d need to smoke them a lot more often.”

 

“You used to.”

 

“This is celebratory. I kicked the habit—only for you, though.” 

 

Debbie snorted and stared into the valley—sagebrush and orange hoodoos, dotted with cattle. One exit off the freeway in a hundred miles of desert. “I’m flattered that you quit poisoning yourself daily for my sake.”

 

Lou quashed the cigarette, unfinished, on the railing and let the wind carry its ashes. Her hand was still wrapped in a dusty Ace bandage.  _ Battle scars,  _ she’d said, accrued over years of cons and bar fights. “Well, I thought I’d make you proud while you were in prison.”

 

Debbie met Lou’s eyes and found something unexpectedly soft. Lou had shed her leathers to reveal a pinstriped, beetle-green vest and a sun-freckled sternum. She spread her arms over the rail and crossed her legs haphazardly—no one took over a space like Lou. She never just stood or reclined; she  _ sprawled.  _ She flung herself into surfaces, just like she did everything else. It was fascinating, tantalizing if she were being honest. (Honesty was something Debbie allowed herself in theory, but never out loud.) 

 

“You’re doing it again,” Lou drawled nonchalantly, peering at her beneath windswept fringe.

 

Debbie sighed. “Doing what?” 

 

“This,” she said, gesturing to Debbie’s innocent eyes, waving a hand up and down in front of her. “Looking at me like you want to devour me alive.”

 

_ Huh.  _ So they were talking about it, all of a sudden. 

 

“Come with a side of fries and beer and I might,” Debbie shot back, her tone playful but her expression dead serious.

 

“Oh honey, I’m the whole plate.”

 

“That was a terrible, terrible joke and you should be ashamed,” Debbie breathed and stepped pointedly into Lou’s personal space, their lips inches apart. For a moment, they let that unbearable silence sit between them like an anvil. She opened her mouth, but apparently her wits had flown away with the buzzards on Route 42. Lou drew out the silence, daring her to do  something. Anything. It was her move, and she could seize the moment or leave it behind. She could play off their conversation as flirtatious banter, or she could kiss her ravishing partner in crime with all the abandon that comes from five years, eight months, and twelve days in prison and God knows how many years of being gone on her.

 

She took Lou’s cheek in her hand, as she’d always done, but this time she stood on her tiptoes and captured Lou’s lips in a searing kiss. True Ocean style—fresh, impulsive, no time for hesitation, she moaned against Lou’s lips and felt her partner’s searching tongue on her teeth. Lou tasted like fire, like fresh-blown glass  _ looked _ , melting smooth and hot into Debbie’s embrace. She tasted like cigarettes and the afternoon’s Red Bull, and she kissed with fervor. Debbie wrapped her fingers around strands of Lou’s hair, letting them knot beneath her touch. 

 

She felt Lou’s hands slip beneath her t-shirt and guided them to the clasp of her bra. “Get it,” she gasped, “off.” 

 

Lou obliged, and as they backed into their hotel room, finagling the curtains shut behind them, Debbie’s bra and shirt dropped into a heap on the floor. Callused thumbs grazed her nipples, followed closely by Lou’s kiss-swollen lips, as she felt herself pushed back onto their shitty, creaking mattress.

 

“Our poor neighbors,” Lou mused with a sly grin, before rolling Debbie’s nipple in her teeth and then sliding back up to nip at the hollow of her neck. God, Lou was something else, some wild storybook thing, her half-dozen necklaces jangling as she moved, wiry arms holding Debbie’s hips in place as heat built inside her.

 

She tugged Lou’s vest over her lead, leaving her in some thin lacy thing, a striped tie, and a shit ton of jewelry. “Like what you see?” Lou teased, dragging fingers across the inside of her thigh.

 

Debbie groaned at her touch. “Fuck me.”

 

“What was that? I think I’ve got dust in my ear.”

 

“God, Lou, shut up and fuck me.” She pulled Lou’s body into hers, straddling her waist and kissing her again, just to commit the taste of her to memory. She felt Lou’s hands press against her aching clit and curl into her, thrusting and circling because really, after so many years of satisfying their sexual frustration through theft alone, it wasn’t worth dragging the first time out.

 

She held a half-clothed, half-leather criminal against her lips, cried out when she came and let the desert envelop it. Lou touched her feather-light, the tips of her fingers learning, then re-learning her body. The dying day cast Lou in a hungry light, betraying her wanting, betraying her flushed cheeks and the gentle flames in her eyes. She burned and burned.

**Author's Note:**

> It was only a matter of time before I started writing for these two. Find me on Tumblr under poeticsandaliens.


End file.
